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Comparing Semantic Fluency in American Sign Language and English
Zed Sevcikova Sehyr1, Marcel R Giezen2, Karen Emmorey1
1School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA.
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
|May 8, 2018
Summary
Semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English is comparable when fingerspelling is included. Language dominance influences performance, with higher scores in the dominant language.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Semantic fluency measures lexical access and retrieval efficiency.
- Understanding cross-modal language performance is crucial for bilingual and multilingual research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of language modality and age of acquisition on semantic fluency.
- To compare semantic fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) and English.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Compared semantic fluency in deaf native/early ASL signers and hearing English speakers.
- Experiment 2: Compared ASL and English fluency in hearing native and late ASL-English bilinguals.
- Included fingerspelled responses in ASL fluency scoring.
Main Results:
- ASL and English fluency scores were similar when fingerspelling was included.
- Semantic fluency scores were higher in the dominant language (English) than the non-dominant language (ASL).
- Fingerspelling was common, used for low-frequency items across signer groups.
Conclusions:
- Semantic fluency is sensitive to language dominance.
- Performance can be compared across spoken and signed modalities.
- Fingerspelled responses are essential for accurate ASL fluency assessment.
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